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Could you tell me why there is such an odd price difference?

Hello,
I'm surprised because I'm thinking of renting a dedicated server located in the US. I know for shared hosting US has always been cheaper and more features than in France. The customer service as well is years ahead in the US.

But when looking for dedicated servers today in 2009 I'm surprised at the prices, perhaps you can explain to me why is it like that?
Please note that I never bought a dedicated hosting yet.
I looked at the sitepoint sponsor, HostGator:http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated.shtml

So it seems to my untrained eyes that DediBox is the best offer of all three, but then see the price difference:
That's $200 more for hostgator per month.

I guess my question is simply "how can this price difference between France and USA be explained?"

I am used to think that USA are way advanced in Internet and so have lower prices for better specs. Perhaps hostgator is a bad example? I think I saw some similar prices for dedicated hosting when I was browsing US web hosting providers. Because I don't want to host in France, but still I looked at their offer and I am puzzled and perhaps there's something I'm missing, a piece of information or something I read badly because I don't know what to look for exactly when shopping for dedicated hosting.

Cheers,
James

Do you really need traffic? Where to? What for?
If you really do need traffic then stop messing around!Advertise on my sites today: She Told Me & Best Reviewer :
200,000+ UV / Month

it makes sense, it's true that I'd like a dedicated server but with the service of a network admin to keep it secure. At the moment I'm with a VPS and I can only play on the memory, increase the RAM or decrease it. The disk and bandwidth is unlimited, I don't even know about the processor and security is handled.
This is good, but if my sites get very high traffic then I end up paying like $400 per month (it depends on the memory used, max is 4GB = 400$)
So I was thinking, maybe for $200 I can have the same comfort and more memory but with a dedicated server.
But yes I understand I'm unrealistic.

Do you really need traffic? Where to? What for?
If you really do need traffic then stop messing around!Advertise on my sites today: She Told Me & Best Reviewer :
200,000+ UV / Month

Dedicated Servers aren't quite like the typical shared hosting packages that see such a wide disparity. Needless to say, there are almost always exceptions to general statements/rules like that. However, in the dedicated arena, price typically reflects management and/or features. In this instance, management makes the major difference. There are a wide range of management types: unmanaged, semi-managed, managed, etc. which the price reflects. Other considerations might include hardware (higher end versus low end, hardware protection, VPNs, etc.) and occasionally software might come into play.

I think the problem is that these US companies are cheaters, webmasters in US not being as aware as in Europe that's maybe why prices are so high...

Hi,

It's nothing of the sort. As already pointed out, the HG offers are managed servers - which done properly costs good money. They may also be using better quality hardware - something often overlooked by people - They'll spend days agonising over what goes in their PC, but not take 30s to think what the hardware quality is like for the servers they rent, which suppor ttheir business. Besdies which, HG is a business - their ultimate sole purpose is to make money at the end of the day.

As for bandwidth being oversold in Europe - it's oversold world over, more so in USA by experience, although we do saddly seem to be catching up over here with the massive overselling